Chasms and Chiasmus
by Quillon42
Summary: Although my first-place OTP has always been Scott and Jean (with Scott and Madelyne as a second-place and Warren and Betsy as third-place), I have always felt bad for Warren in terms of his feelings for Jean and how he never came anywhere close to success with her. This story somewhat scratches that itch and all that.


CHASMS AND CHIASMUS

_(NB1:A Chiasmus is a poetic term for reversals or inversions of ideas; it has its word root in Greek, for shaping in the letter "X" formation (how appropriate, here), and I'm using it very loosely here with poetic license because there is here, if not a reversal, at least a swap of connections between Scott/Jean and Warren/…Kwannon (see note below on Kwannon as against Betsy)…at least the body pairings are being swapped here, if there is not a perfect swap of the people within the bodies (I almost said "spirits within" just now, but that would be more (Square) Enix than Phoenix, for X-Men purposes, I suppose)._

_(NB2: I know that in the early 1990s, Psylocke was still "Betsy" even though she was in the body of Kwannon; as I explain in this story, though, this contemplates a reality in which a couple of things are different, such as the fact that here the British Betsy goes back to her original body, and the Asian Kwannon does the same. I hope you guys enjoy this one in any case)._

Even over so many decades, it never became any easier being around the mansion. Every time he crossed the front door threshold, Warren would warp himself back to the beginning, and think of how he did his best in all things…and, in one context, it was never enough.

The seraphic sufferer had sustained all brands of pain throughout the years. Betrayal by his best friend Cameron. Virtual enslavement by Apocalypse. Those ordeals were nothing, though, compared to the anguish he experienced every day from the flame in his heart which could never be extinguished.

More than anything else, the greatest source of pain—stemming from what he felt was the greatest failure in his life—was Warren's inability to win the Grey Girl's heart.

And the agony never went away; if anything, it worsened dramatically over time. Matters seemed bad enough back in the Sixties, when the wealthy Worthington knew that he was leagues ahead of the homely Hank and the babyish Bobby in competing for the affections of the one girl in their class. But then there was that wicked wild card who was Scott Summers, the one whose expression you could never really read, given the optic inhibitors which obfuscated his features to an extent.

Warren knew, though, that the other man was after the same as he—and to his eternal dismay, Scott would be the one whom Jean would choose in the end. All the times that the winged wonder took her out, in his expensive convertible out on the town, all the occasions in which he got her alone, and he would try to move in, dart in for a kiss at the end of what seemed to be a decent date…and she would just look the other way, disaffectedly. It just wasn't meant to happen between them, as much as the man ever so passionately railed against the impossibility of it.

_Ah, well,_ he would think to himself, by the start of the following decade, _at least it would just remain the five of us, me and the guys…and Scott and Jean, together…but we would remain a nice, tight, closely-knit family of sorts for the duration. _

Of course, that wasn't meant to be, either.

The man still burned, so badly, from the encounters he'd had with that "roughneck lowlife creep" Logan. From the initial encounter in the Seventies between Jean and that fuck of a canuck in the mansion's garden, which Warren witnessed firsthand, then tried to interrupt, only to incur the wrath of his love…then the Eighties' Infernal incident in a literally-demonized Manhattan, when that hairy horror had his hands all over her—and the nerve to suck her in, ever so orally…to the gladiatorial "game," just recently now in the early Nineties, that his BFF-turned-bastard Hodge subjected him to, of course with Logan, with Jean as the perennial match to light the conflagration between the two men, a fire greater than the aforementioned flames that ever so evilly, infernally consumed New York. And even though Warren's wings went off on their own, with no ability on his part to control them, he'd savaged the other man, far more than he honestly ever wanted to. And at the end of it all, she'd jumped down into their makeshift arena…and she went to Logan, to comfort him as best she could, somewhat motheringly but mostly lovingly. And all Warren got was a soft sort of scolding from her, with encouragement about the light within him, but just words and no actions nonetheless. And all that could penetrate his brainpan, then:

_She went…to _him_…and not… _

More than anything it hurt like hell because there was that woman, the one who was there from the beginning when they were the original five "Men," and then when they were the original five Factor, and through all that time and proximity, Warren couldn't place any closer than maybe fourth or fifth in Jeans's heart…if he placed at all.

And the effing second that the Canadian Wolf would be at the door—after wandering around the planet for years on end—she'd still take that lout over him. It was insanely maddening.

In the end, in any case, it was all for nothing, really, as she remained with Scott through and through. The bitterness, the intensity…the utter futility of the rivalry between Warren and Logan, it was all just enraged toys, all wound up and knocking against each other, with little more than sympathetic hugs or hand caresses from Jean here and there…just physical contact from teammate to teammate.

It could never really be anything more than that.

Warren had noticed, of late, though, that the new girl…the incredibly exotic one with lush violet hair and golden skin…she too had caught the fancy of quite a few men in the mansion. He'd also noticed that the one who'd captured her attention the most was the one who was the most…

…spoken for.

The angelic original'd walked down the dimly-lit hallways now, trying to stay quiet given that the hour was late. When he'd reached the kitchen, to catch sight of the scarlet-scalped lady who'd scored his heart from the first—and he caught sight of the morose moistness in her eyes—Warren was primed to melt.

For several instants the man held the gaze of the woman he wanted all these years, and he saw a hurt and longing that he'd heretofore only caught in the mirror. He grasped the chair next to hers and settled himself in wordlessly.

"… … …Scott…" was all the lady adjacent to him could say for a moment. Then: "…

"…I've lost him, Warren."

The high-flying hero shook his head softly. "What…what do you mean? I heard this morning he was preparing for a debriefing…"

"No, he's lost. Warren. He's lost…to me."

The Archangel looked deeper into the magnificently verdant eyes of the girl he'd loved unrequitedly and unconditionally for so long. "I don't understand…"

"It's that new bih—the new girl. The would-be Betsy.

"_Kwannon."_

Jean spread her hands slowly across the tabletop, unable to suppress a shiver of angst. Warren started to extend an arm in sympathy but the other shot her hand out in his direction. "I can't believe this…after all we…had together…"

Then she clapped her hands to her face and rubbed her fingers up and down.

"Jean…I…"

The always-unworthy Worthington hesitated here as he never before did. Here was an immaculate maiden, with streaking sunrise for hair and nitroglycerine in her veins, the lady he virtually worshipped all this time. He had to be careful.

"I'm sure that this is just…a small thing…Jean. You're right: the two of you have faced down so many obstacles, so many setbacks. These things are bound to happen to anyone in any relation…"

"It's bad, though," cut in the ravishing redhead next to him. "It's all because of what happened in Genosha. I know it."

Unlike in our mainstream reality, in which it was never definitively revealed (at least to this author's knowledge) as to whether, during what we knew as The X-tinction Agenda, the infamous-if- brief prison cell makeout session between Jean and 'Rine—yes, that lowlife creep again—had ever reached eyes and ears beyond those of Hodge and his fascist brass…in this universe the little intimate incident got around. And when Scott gained wind of it…it did, indeed, effectively destroy him more than any weapon that Cameron could devise, as the mockery of a man himself commented.

And unlike in our reality, the Cyclops of this world was a bit more petulant. A bit more unforgiving.

A bit more retaliatory.

After all, Scott did give up a perfectly stable redhead relation in Alaska in the mid-eighties, to be with the Marvelous Girl/Woman…and _this_ was what she did in return?!

So after the X-ers all sold out and plunged into the mainstream over the next couple of years—during which time, in this reality, the European Betsy and the Asian Kwannon managed to straighten themselves out mentally and bodily, with both to survive for the duration with telepathic talents intact and with Betsy joining her brother in Excalibur while Kwannon staying in the States for the Blue Team—the latter's latent advances on the overseer Summers were not met unanswered. Kwannon, in truth, was not the prim, purple, perhaps even prudish pseudo-governess who acted out in lavender armor or at least pranced around in pink pajamas. Kwannon was a violet, violent vixen who got the job done on missions in an immodest leotard…

…and who got the job done in seduction wearing so much less, if it could be imagined.

The first salvo, which was arguably the strongest (yet which mysteriously was never hyped up nearly as much, in any universe, as the later episodes) was the woman's matter-of-fact sprint onto the scene in the scantest of cinnamon swimsuits, right around the time of the initial skirmishes with Omega Red. The alluring woman's auric curves, and the coursing of pool water from her generously bared skin, neither escaped the leader's notice…nor did the smell of her funk in his leather jacket when she gave it back to him after they all found Logan's mask in the wreckage close to the mansion. Jean had wondered why the hell, later that evening, her man was lounging so languishingly on their bed, wearing nothing but his boxers and that jacket, and writhing as if in a trance.

Then she read into his head, and found that he was imagining someone else who was actually in that coat not long before—someone who was otherwise wearing a lot less than frigging boxers. And Jean knew, just then at the very beginning of the end, that her love wanted to make the "time for levity" that he had so chastised Kwannon about before they set off to rescue Hank and the others.

The other times…the time at the picnic, near the lake, with Kwannon's glorious rise out of the water and the irretrievable loss of Scott's attention thereafter…the moment in Russia in which Scott ran into the bathroom after his horrible Stryfe-stricken nightmare, and in this reality caught Kwannon utterly UN-toweled…those momentous memories were unbearable to Jean as well, when she learned of them secondhandedly through her longstanding love's ruminations.

But the worst of it, of course, was when Kwannon caught Scott coming right off the repair job he was polishing off…he all covered in sweat and machine oil…she profuse with pheromones and beauty oil…and she shoving her lips, shunting her body into his space and claiming him for her own.

And he giving it all right back in this reality, without question or hesitation.

Lunch with the scarlet significant other wasn't even a consideration for Scott that day, as the man would now merge much more insidiously with his exotic interloper than he ever did with En Sabah Nur. And now, hours later, Jean withered at the kitchen table, wondering where it all went wrong.

"It…it's just a bump in the road, Jean," said Warren, as soothingly as he could, "the two of you will work it out, kid. You've come back from…"

"NO, HE'S GONE! He severed the rapport with me, made a new one with that…Kwannon-come-lately…" She put her head down and buried her face in her forearms, rueing the fact that Scott forewent his infrared connection for an ultraviolet one now.

And again Warren didn't know what to say, what to do. A second later, Jean mercifully made the decision for him.

"I'm just…I'm just…" she started in another ten seconds, after situating herself to be shaking in the arms of the Angel, "I've never felt so alone. Not even in the Jamaica Bay cocoon that that…energy monster of the Phoenix put me in. I'm not used to this. It's all just…me…no one else.

"The Professor; he's just out of touch, generationally, in terms of those kinds of feelings." (This was all, of course, before the whole Onslaught thing and those heady revelations she would realize about Charles). "Ororo's off on a mission, and otherwise on her fucking high horse all the time anyway. And Lo…well…"

She knew that Warren didn't want to hear anything about the roughneck. The lady was aware of what was basically a blood feud between them—with neither of them really attaining that for which they competed so intensely and graphically.

Matters concerning Logan weren't immediate, anyway, as he was off at this time, in this reality, doing his annual "'Pooring and Whoring" (ie scoring cheap chicks in Madripoor).

It was his loss. That clawed cretin, himself so much more prominent of a prostitute than any woman he wooed in any part of the world.

"It's my fault, Jean."

She looked up at him, from her place in the crook of his arm.

"If I hadn't agitated Cameron…if I never effing _knew_ him in the first place…the whole thing in Genosha wouldn't have happened, with…you know…and you and Scott would still be…"

"Oh, shush."

And for the first time, Warren found the woman's lips enveloping his own in an impassioned oral embrace. This was not the strictly-friendly kiss between friends that he pulled off with the Phoenix fake, years and years back, with she in costume and he in a headband and sickly-striped-somewhat-of-a-wifebeater. Now it was the genuine Jean, the real redhead who pushed her tongue deep into the parched cavern of his mouth, trapped his own with her teeth. He remained there, in this labial lock, in this stasis of satisfaction, for what seemed simultaneously like an eternity and an instant. And when she released both his mouth and the rest of him, he found himself hungering more than he ever did.

This was what he yearned for over all the years. It was all he could do to keep himself in check.

He looked to Jean and received a neutral glance in return, an unreadable expression, one which he prayed did not convey any kind of sentiment of misstep between the two.

The thoughts flashed through his mind, of agonizing for hours in '86 as to whether he should call Scott, shake up the other man's home, and wreck his chances with the woman of his own dreams, when Warren first learned of Jean's return. Of making that fatal decision, during the time known as the Mutant Massacre, of following the maroon mindmistress into the tunnels, rather than chase after his Candace—with the Hand of Fate deciding, most lethally, what was to become of Candy thereafter. (Not to mention what would become of Warren himself for trying to defend the Morlocks that time).

Warren thought of his taking Jean into his arms, to carry her on a mission slightly before then, with Scott watching leerily nearby as a bit of distance loomed between himself and the leader's first love…the then-unmetallic Angel playfully cooed a flirtatious codename into Jean's ear, and she returned with one of her own…

"Double-O Seven."

He looked her way again, after this latest, tense moment, after she uttered this.

"That's what it was. What I called you then."

He blushed deeply, knowing now that she must have read him mentally all this time. And indeed she did; she drank in all his wanting, all his suffering, for her, everything from the mansion's garden, to the arena in Genosha, to his sobbing atop the Statue of Liberty, which he recollected while in the midst of an awful space opera not long after Inferno.

And finally, after all of this, Jean offered him an oasis in his desert of perpetual longing.

She extended a hand his way. "I need…I want…please, Warren."

He squeezed her hand tightly, tenderly, in response.

"Anything, Mata Hari."

And they left the kitchen together, arm in arm.

About a week later, an overrated and underheighted roughneck came swaggering back to Westchester. He figured that he could once more pull his usual boorish badass schtick to make all the XX-chromosomed X-"Men" swoon ever so instantaneously. He especially wished to effect such with mutantdom's First Redhead. Logan always loved to get under Scott's skin that way.

But oh, how much the man missed in his wholesale whoring on the other side of the planet, when he came to sight his beryl lady love, linked in arms with…that flyboy feeb. The two were gallivanting so gaily along the front walk of the big house, the woman with a smile more relaxed and free than anyone had witnessed in so long. The angel whose arm she engaged—his face beamed even more brightly, for finally attaining that for which he had starved all this time.

And they knew that, out on some mission in the Far East, the new couple that was "Sconnon" was satisfied as well, even if only in lust. They celebrated their questionable connection with tea and scones, the latter to pun awfully on the moniker for their bond. What Scott gave up made for a tragic loss, what he had now something arguably less…

…but it wasn't the worst he could have had. It's not like he was shacked up with some sketchy, frosty faux blonde with a false inflection or anything.

Now, though, on the lawn of the Mansion, Jean and Warren crossed paths with the ubervenerated concubine-collecting copulator with chintzy-ass claws.

The winged one regarded him warily, and the other man could feel, most predictably, tension tinged with fear on the Angel.

The woman marginally acknowledged Logan's existence, and the other man could feel, unbelievably now, disaffection mixed with disdain cresting off of her.

Yes, just as Jean could fall out of love with her Slim soulmate in a Forever reality, and said Summers could do the same with her in this universe, so too could Red Grey actually discard, for good, her emotions for Logan. (This author understands that such a happenstance is head-explodingly inconceivable and abhorrently unacceptable, but that was the way it was here).

And now, as the same lady made off with the W who always was, and who always would be (as per his surname) Worthier than the Wolvy One, and the chiasmus crisscross closed the chasms of solitude for those deserving it, one thought penetrated the left-cold Canuck's cranium:

_ She went…to _him_…and not…_


End file.
